Trump Aide Says Press Secretary Used ‘Alternative Facts’

White
House Press Secretary Sean Spicer makes a statement to members of the
media at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on Jan.
21, 2017.Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images

A top adviser to President Donald Trump said Sunday that
his press secretary, Sean Spicer, had offered “alternative facts” in a
statement the day before from the White House briefing room in which he
contested reports on the size of Trump’s inauguration audience.

Her remark drew a riposte from the program’s host, Chuck Todd.“Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”Conway’s characterization of Spicer’s statement exacerbated a
growing rift between Trump’s White House and the news organizations
that cover it, less than two days into his administration. On Saturday,
his first full day in office, Trump and Spicer both made easily
disproved claims, adding fuel to his opponents’ charges that the
president is a habitual liar.

CIA Speech

During a speech
at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Trump accused the media --
whom he termed “among the most dishonest human beings on Earth” -- of
inventing a “feud” between him and the U.S. intelligence community. In
fact, Trump has fought a running public battle with intelligence
community leaders for months over their conclusion that the Russian
government intervened in the presidential campaign, going so far as to
suggest that the CIA was the source of leaks against him.

“One
last shot at me,” Trump said about the intelligence community 11 Janunary on
Twitter, where he has over 21,000,000 followers. “Are we living in Nazi
Germany?”

In the same appearance at the Central Intelligence
Agency, Trump mused that “a million or a million and a half” people had
attended his inauguration.

There is no official crowd count for
the event, but photographs from the same vantage point at about the same
time of day clearly show that attendance was significantly less than at
Barack Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, when city officials said
that 1.8 million people gathered on the National Mall. The Washington
subway system said that it had fewer riders by 11 a.m. Friday than at
the same time on the day of Obama’s second, smaller inauguration in
2013.

Photographs and data from the subway system, Metro, also
indicate that Saturday’s Women’s March on Washington, a protest against
Trump, outdrew the inauguration. Over 1 million people rode Metro on
Saturday, transit authority CEO Paul Wiedefeld said in a letter to
employees. It was the second-busiest day in the system’s history, after
Obama’s 2009 inauguration, he said. Total ridership on Friday was
570,557, which would not rank among the system’s highest ridership days.

Spicer Statement

Late in the afternoon on Saturday,
Spicer took to the podium in the White House briefing room for the first
time to say that Trump’s inauguration audience was the largest ever
“both in person and around the globe.”

Using misleading subway
ridership numbers, Spicer claimed that more people rode Metro on the day
of Trump’s inauguration than during Obama’s second inauguration. Spicer
compared ridership numbers at 11 a.m. for Obama’s 2013 inauguration
with full-day numbers for Trump’s event, which would include many more
people on return trips.

Full-day ridership for Obama’s first
inauguration was a record 1.5 million. Metro ridership on an average
weekday in 2016 was about 639,000.

Television coverage of Trump’s inauguration reached an average of 30.6 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media
figures reported Saturday by The Hollywood Reporter. By comparison,
almost 38 million people watched Obama’s first swearing-in ceremony in
2009, and 41.8 million viewers for Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural,
according to data reported by Nielsen. The ratings for Trump don’t
account for the increase in alternative methods of watching, such as
streaming on mobile devices. Spicer took no questions from
reporters on Saturday and didn’t specify how many people the White House
believes attended the inauguration.

“This is called a statement
you’re told to make by the president,” former White House spokesman Ari
Fleischer said on Twitter after Spicer’s remarks. “And you know the
president is watching.”

After Conway’s remarks, Merriam-Webster
weighed in on Twitter, posting a definition of the word “fact” and a
link to its website. “Lookups for ‘fact’ spiked after Kellyanne Conway
described false statements as ‘alternative facts’,” the dictionary
publisher said.

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said
that media coverage indicating higher turnout at the Women’s March in
Washington and at previous inaugurations compare to Trump’s inauguration
amounted to attacks on the president’s political legitimacy.

“There’s
an obsession by the media to delegitimize this president, and we are
not going to sit around and let it happen,” Priebus said on “Fox News
Sunday.” “We’re going to fight back tooth and nail every day, and twice
on Sunday.”